Barely Legal
by Nicola1
Summary: Lex POV -- Lex/Lana (Lex/Clark implied): Lana is everything Clark wants; she's nothing Lex wants -- but sometimes nothing is better than being alone.


**Author:** Nicola

**Email:** nicola@iridescentglow.com

**Title:** Barely Legal

**Rating:** R

**Classification:** Lex POV -- Lex/Lana (Lex/Clark implied, Lana/Clark canon)

**Disclaimer:** Lex belongs to The WB, DC comics, and probably that guy with the ink pot. Damn.

**Feedback:** Loved and adored: send it to nicola@iridescentglow.com

**Summary:** Lana is everything Clark wants; she's nothing Lex wants -- but sometimes nothing is better than being alone.

**Note:** The title is shamelessly stolen from the excellent song by The Strokes, which also acted as initial inspiration for this piece.

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She is the fairytale princess. He is the dashing hero. What am I?

The sidekick? Not likely. The evil genius? I doubt it. My father goes to great lengths to tell me how many ways I'm worth shit.

She's everything he's ever wanted. She's nothing I've ever wanted. Metropolis is filled with girls like her; I've met dozens, fucked a few more besides. I watch him watching her: slender limbs with just enough curve to make him blush; pretty, expressive features which glow with warmth in his presence.

I see what he sees, but I never blush, and the smooth china of her skin shimmers chrome in my darkness. Her hot breath is cooled by my cold touch. A scream: outside or inside my head, I'm not sure. It doesn't matter; the ecstasy and the pain are the same, drawing her down.

She smiles in the same way he does: broad and candid, yet achingly shy. The difference is, he smiles happiness; she smiles a veil. Nobody bothers to looks behind the big smiles and into the sad eyes. And yet, it's the sadness which makes her special. It's the sadness in her eyes which is intoxicating; her long lashes filtering it beautiful.

_Special. Beautiful._ There's a memory somewhere in my mind: fingers roughly stroking the hair off my forehead; a woman's voice -- just another woman who was not my mother -- telling me _how beautiful . . . how special . . . how expressive_ my eyes were_._ Years later, I would spend hours in front of the mirror, quelling such expression; composing blankness on a soiled canvas. _Practise, practise, practise._ "A real man does not show emotion," my father would censure, spreading his hands over my fort; destroying soldiers with his fingertips, deferring the world with hard, blank eyes. _Practise, practise, practise._ Practise makes perfect, and perfect is utterly blank as far as I'm concerned. Maybe blank is what Lana hopes to learn as she sucks my cock.

It wasn't about love with us; it was about mouths and fingers, skin and sweat. It wasn't about our hearts; neither beating nor seemingly still. If you can fuck with your minds, we did.

She came to my doorstep that first night alone and dressed in dark colours (that's how I see her in my mind's eyes anyway, although I don't discount the possibility that it's an invented aberration on my part of my memory). Although, she could have been standing in the middle of a teeming football field, prancing in that ridiculous cheerleader costume of hers, and she still would have looked the same to me: dark and alone. Her confusion, her pain -- both real and magnified by hormones -- was like a beacon, rendering her gloriously, devastatingly _fuckably_ appealing to my jaded eyes.

I can only guess what she was looking for: something easy in a world which wasn't; someone who didn't look at her and see a little girl in a fairy princess costume. (Too bad neither of these assumptions were true -- it didn't matter then, it doesn't now.) My reasons were more oblique. An easy fuck? Those are ten a penny when you have a Porsche and a mansion. Someone to love? Lana already had love--and respect--and adoration: I was something else entirely. Comfort? There's no such luxury as far as I'm concerned.

I wanted Lana because I wanted dark hair which fell into darker eyes; cheekbones you could straddle and ride: a touch that could change things.

She was everything he wanted. He was everything I wanted.

I sometimes try to remember that night by the pool; our first meeting. In my memory, which glitters aquamarine and tastes of perfume and chlorine, a brattish sixteen-year-old shows off in front of a girl who tells him he has pretty eyes, but sees only shiny dollar signs reflected in them. Lana is just a possibility at this point; a shadow girl I wish I could see more clearly. In my mind's distortion of the memory, my future encounters with her segue into the past: another face pasted over that of the girl I never bothered to call; our bodies fluid and weightless beneath the rhythmic ripples of heat and desire.

Here and now, on carpet reserved for undeserving guests, there's none of the desire of my imagination: it's all fucking and crying. Don't misunderstand: it's me fucking, her crying. Her big, beautiful, _expressive_ eyes; liquid pain staring back at me. There's a jolt of recognition in my stomach, which I quell before it shows in my eyes.

I cry dry, noiseless tears from a heart which aches to be elsewhere; shivering inside as she reminds me of everything I was and everything I will never be: everything I don't have, and everything he wants that I can never give.


End file.
